Tomo-chan wa Onna no ko!
- Thread starter MangaDex
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2018
- Messages
- 45
https://mangadex.org/chapter/196696/13
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2018
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- 38
I'm glad it's over.
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2018
- Messages
- 74
I'm glad I got to read this. It's been a wild ride. I'm gonna miss it, it was superb.
Hopefully an anime soon?
Hopefully an anime soon?
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2018
- Messages
- 7,995
What a crap last arc.
I will probably never reread this.
I only read it once because i really like characters like Misuzu.
Tomo and Jun romance is the worst part of this story, kinda ironic when it's the main selling point...
Oh well, at least it's over.
I will probably never reread this.
I only read it once because i really like characters like Misuzu.
Tomo and Jun romance is the worst part of this story, kinda ironic when it's the main selling point...
Oh well, at least it's over.
MD@Home
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2018
- Messages
- 624
I'm afraid Tomo-chan is a good example of how you can't get away with writing a story without having the faintest idea of how you want it to end.
Perhaps when he started drawing this, even Fumita had no idea how successful Tomo-chan could become. At first, it was just a simple gag manga setup: Tomo wants Jun to notice her as a girl, but Jun only sees her as his childhood friend/buddy. Simple enough premise, but great starting point for many jokes and other shenanigans... for a while. But you can only milk the status quo for so long, so the author can basically do two things: bring in more stuff, or move the story forward. Needless to say, most harem series do the former, bringing in more and more love interests simply because there's no plot to move anywhere. Thankfully this is not one of those series, and while Fumita also did the former at first, it was done in moderation and to great success: Carol was a fantastic addition to the cast, for instance.
But there comes a point when the cast is already big enough that adding even more people would create its own share of problems, and Fumita thankfully also realized this in time. However, it's apparent (especially in retrospect) that while he established the initial conflicts, he not only lacked an idea of how those would be resolved, but also why these conflicts were happening in the first place. Why can't Jun see Tomo as a girl? He had no clue. Why
? Whatever. Why
? Who knows. (Even after we kind-sorta were provided with some explanation, I still don't truly understand that part. What's that
?)
It is painfully obvious now that we're at the end that Fumita had next to no idea about any of this stuff and simply made things up as he went along, sometimes driving the plot into literal dead ends or situations that would have been very problematic if left unchecked. Remember chapter 515(https://mangadex.org/chapter/218120/1)? Man, that was so long ago. People (including me) were up in arms about how the story made a U-turn for seemingly no reason just when Tomo would have
. But now it's clear why that happened, and no, not because of the excuse you can see in the chapter itself:
. Not quite the moral you'd want your story to have. To Fumita's credit, once he realized that this direction is bad, he used this revelation as a driving force for the rest of Tomo's plotline, but unfortunately this resulted in the total elimination of actual, worthwhile conflict from the story, especially given how closely Carol's and Tomo's romantic problems have come to resemble each other. Funnily enough, the resolution to Carol's storyline was actually pretty satisfying, the
-type of explanation worked well once, but twice in a row? Nah, not really. And let's not get me started on how Misuzu's part was "resolved", because no, it really wasn't. 
If anyone had any doubts about the above, they were surely crushed by the last arc: Fumita, noticing that the way Tomo
had next to no impact because of what came before, started grasping at straws, looking for any, any I do mean any kind of conflict which would be unique to Tomo and Jun and which he could use the finally end the series. That's how we got to the
arc, and yeah... the story pretty much went out with a whimper.
A shame, because many parts of the story were awesome, the daily format really worked in the series' favor (Dropout did a great job with the scanlations as well, thanks guys ), many of the characters were memorable and interesting... but it never really came together to form a coherent whole. Maybe next time.
Perhaps when he started drawing this, even Fumita had no idea how successful Tomo-chan could become. At first, it was just a simple gag manga setup: Tomo wants Jun to notice her as a girl, but Jun only sees her as his childhood friend/buddy. Simple enough premise, but great starting point for many jokes and other shenanigans... for a while. But you can only milk the status quo for so long, so the author can basically do two things: bring in more stuff, or move the story forward. Needless to say, most harem series do the former, bringing in more and more love interests simply because there's no plot to move anywhere. Thankfully this is not one of those series, and while Fumita also did the former at first, it was done in moderation and to great success: Carol was a fantastic addition to the cast, for instance.
But there comes a point when the cast is already big enough that adding even more people would create its own share of problems, and Fumita thankfully also realized this in time. However, it's apparent (especially in retrospect) that while he established the initial conflicts, he not only lacked an idea of how those would be resolved, but also why these conflicts were happening in the first place. Why can't Jun see Tomo as a girl? He had no clue. Why
did Carol and her childhood friend (forgot his name) get stuck in a similar status quo
is Misuzu so desperate to keep "girlifying" Tomo
"plan" of Misuzu that Carol kept referring to about Tomo and Jun time and time again
It is painfully obvious now that we're at the end that Fumita had next to no idea about any of this stuff and simply made things up as he went along, sometimes driving the plot into literal dead ends or situations that would have been very problematic if left unchecked. Remember chapter 515(https://mangadex.org/chapter/218120/1)? Man, that was so long ago. People (including me) were up in arms about how the story made a U-turn for seemingly no reason just when Tomo would have
finally confessed to Jun in a situation that was almost impossible to misunderstand
if Tomo would have won Jun's heart like that, it would have meant that she only counts as a girl if she acts the part, including wearing feminine clothes and makeup
"it's not like he didn't notice, it's that he didn't want to notice"
If anyone had any doubts about the above, they were surely crushed by the last arc: Fumita, noticing that the way Tomo
and Jun realized their love for each other
"You have to beat me to date my daughter"
A shame, because many parts of the story were awesome, the daily format really worked in the series' favor (Dropout did a great job with the scanlations as well, thanks guys
), many of the characters were memorable and interesting... but it never really came together to form a coherent whole. Maybe next time.
